Achille Mbembe

Introduction

Achille Mbembe (born 1957) is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and philosopher whose concept of necropolitics has become essential for understanding contemporary forms of power, violence, and sovereignty. His work extends Michel Foucault’s biopolitics—power over life—to theorize necropower: sovereignty’s ultimate expression as the power to dictate who lives and who dies, to create “death-worlds” where populations are subjected to conditions of living death.

Mbembe’s analysis of the postcolony examines how African states operate through distinctive logics of power combining violence, spectacle, and the grotesque—producing forms of domination that can’t be understood through European political theory’s categories. His work challenges Eurocentric theories assuming Western political development as universal model, demonstrating how colonialism and slavery fundamentally shaped modernity’s categories of sovereignty, subjectivity, and political life.

More recently, his writings on Afropolitanism and black reason analyze how blackness has been constructed as object of European thought, how race operates as technology of domination, and how Af ricans and people of African descent navigate global modernity while transforming it. His work bridges African philosophy, postcolonial theory, and critical theory, making him one of contemporary thought’s most influential theorists of violence, race, and power.

Biography

Early Life and Education

Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Cameroon, experiencing French colonialism’s final years and witnessing Cameroon’s independence (1960) and postcolonial state formation. He studied history and political science in Cameroon before pursuing graduate education in France, completing his PhD in history at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) in 1989.

His formation spanned African independence movements’ optimism and their subsequent disappointments—military coups, one-party states, economic crises, and neocolonial dependency. This experience shaped his critical attention to how postcolonial African states reproduce and transform colonial power rather than simply overcoming it.

Academic Career

Mbembe has held positions at universities across Africa, Europe, and North America. He taught at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University while maintaining connections with African institutions. Currently, he’s Research Professor in History and Politics at Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and Professor at Duke University.

His intellectual trajectory moves from historical studies of colonial and postcolonial Cameroon through theoretical elaborations of the postcolony, necropolitics, and contemporary analyses of race, migration, and Afropolitanism. This combination of historical rigor and theoretical innovation characterizes his distinctive approach.

Major Works and Recognition

His major works include On the Postcolony (2001), the essay “Necropolitics” (2003), Critique of Black Reason (2017), and Necropolitics (expanded 2019). He’s received numerous awards including Gerda Henkel Award (2018) and Geschwister-Scholl Prize (2015).

Mbembe is also public intellectual engaging contemporary African politics, global migration crises, and debates about decolonization. He’s been controversial figure in South African debates about decolonizing universities, land reform, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Key Concepts

Necropolitics and Necropower

Necropolitics extends Foucault’s biopolitics—modern power operating through managing, optimizing, and disciplining life—to examine sovereignty as fundamentally about the right to kill. Modern sovereignty, Mbembe argues, isn’t primarily about making live or letting die (Foucault) but about determining who deserves to live and who must die, creating zones of exception where death is administered as state policy.

Necropower names the power to create death-worlds—social conditions resembling death more than life. Concentration camps, plantations, colonies, contemporary Gaza, refugee camps—all exemplify necropower: populations subjected to conditions of permanent emergency, violence, and social death yet kept alive for exploitation or control.

Mbembe’s examples:

Slavery: Reducing humans to commodities, instruments, objects—living death
Colony: Terror-based domination creating permanent state of exception for colonized
Late-modern occupation (Palestine): Fragmentation, sieges, targeted killing creating death-worlds
Apartheid: Spatial segregation, dispossession, violence as everyday condition

Necropolitics illuminates how contemporary capitalism, borders, and security states function: mass incarceration, drone strikes, border deaths, police killings, refugee crises—all involve determining who deserves life and who’s consigned to death-worlds. This concept influenced critical race theory, studies of police violence, prison abolition movements, and analyses of border politics.

The Postcolony

On the Postcolony (2001) analyzes distinctive forms of power, violence, and political life characterizing postcolonial African states. The postcolony isn’t simply “after colonialism” but specific historical formation where colonial and postcolonial logics interweave, producing distinctive governance regimes.

Postcolonial power operates through:

Commandement: Arbitrary, violent authority claiming absolute power
Obscenity and grotesque: Spectacles of power combining violence, vulgarity, and theatricality
Conviviality: Ruled populations simultaneously accommodating and subverting power
Zombification: Disciplining bodies through terror, rumor, and spectacular violence

Against theories treating African states as failed Western states, Mbembe shows they operate through their own logics. Corruption, violence, and chaos aren’t simply dysfunction but how power functions—producing unpredictability, arbitrariness, and spectacular displays binding populations through fear and complicity.

This work challenged development discourse treating African states as deficient versions of Western models, showing instead that postcolonial power requires analysis on its own terms, attending to colonial legacies, global capitalism’s pressures, and distinctive historical trajectories.

Black Reason

Critique of Black Reason (2017) examines how race—particularly blackness—functions as technology of power and object of European thought. Black reason names the discourses, practices, and institutions through which Europe constructed blacks as objects: chattel slavery, colonial domination, scientific racism, cultural anthropology, developmental economics.

Mbembe traces how blackness has been:

Commodified: Slaves as things to own, sell, work to death
Animalized: Reduced to body, instinct, nature vs. white reason and culture
Infantilized: Requiring civilizing, tutoring, development by white guardians
Spectacularized: Object of fascination, horror, desire in white imagination

But black reason isn’t simply imposed from outside. Blacks have challenged, appropriated, and transformed these categories—creating distinctive modernities, philosophies, and political projects. Afrodiasporic thought, Pan-Africanism, Negritude, Black Power—all engage and exceed European categories.

The book argues that race remains central to contemporary capitalism despite post-racial rhetoric. Globalization extends race logic globally: determining whose lives matter, whose labor is exploitable, whose deaths are mourned or ignored.

Afropolitanism

Afropolitanism names cosmopolitan African identities engaging global culture while remaining rooted in African experience. Against both Afrocentrism (celebrating African authenticity) and assimilation (abandoning African identity for Western integration), Afropolitanism embraces hybrid identities navigating multiple worlds simultaneously.

Afropolitans are Africans and people of African descent who:

Inhabit multiple cultural worlds without fully belonging to any
Draw on African, European, American, Asian influences
Engage global cultural production while transforming it
Refuse both victimization narratives and denial of racism’s ongoing effects

This concept influenced debates about African identity, diaspora, and globalization. Critics argue it privileges elite Africans with access to global mobility and multicultural capital, overlooking masses experiencing globalization through exploitation and dispossession.

Colonization of the Future

Mbembe argues that contemporary capitalism colonizes not just space (territory, resources) but time—particularly the future. Debt, indenture, precarity, environmental catastrophe—all involve mortgaging futures, making tomorrow another form of property that capital expropriates.

This temporal colonization affects everyone but particularly impacts those already dispossessed. Climate crisis exemplifies this: Global South populations who contributed least to warming face catastrophic futures. Debt structures transfer wealth from debtor nations’ futures to creditor nations’ presents. Precarious labor means working without futures—no pensions, security, or life-planning possible.

Decolonization today requires reclaiming futures—refusing to accept that alternatives are impossible, that catastrophe is inevitable, that tomorrow already belongs to capital.

Influence and Legacy

Critical Race Theory and Black Studies

Mbembe’s necropolitics concept became foundational for analyzing anti-Black violence: police killings, mass incarceration, environmental racism, health disparities. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on prison abolition, and Saidiya Hartman’s analyses of afterlives of slavery all engage Mbembian frameworks.

His examination of how slavery created social death influenced Afro-pessimism (Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton) though he rejects Afro-pessimism’s claim that Black suffering is ontological rather than historical-political.

Postcolonial Theory

Mbembe extends postcolonial theory beyond its focus on culture and representation to examine violence, sovereignty, and political economy. His work complements Edward Said’s Orientalism and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial psychiatry, demonstrating how colonialism structures contemporary politics, not just historical past.

His concept of postcolony influenced how scholars theorize postcolonial state formation, distinguishing between formal decolonization and ongoing colonial power relations.

Border Studies and Migration

Necropolitics illuminates contemporary border violence: deaths in Mediterranean, U.S.-Mexico border, refugee camps, detention centers. These spaces exemplify death-worlds where migrants are neither simply killed nor allowed to live fully—suspended in zones where death is constant possibility.

His work influenced how scholars analyze borders as sites where sovereignty is performed through violence, where lives are sorted into those deserving protection vs. those consigned to death-worlds.

Security Studies and War

Mbembe’s analysis of late-modern warfare—drone strikes, targeted killing, permanent emergency, colonial occupation—transformed how scholars think about contemporary security states. The “war on terror” exemplifies necropolitics: designating populations (Muslims, Arabs, Afghans) as threats justifying permanent military intervention, surveillance, and killing.

Critiques and Debates

Afro-pessimism Debate

Afro-pessimist scholars argue Mbembe insufficiently attends to Black specificity—treating Blackness as one instance of racialized dispossession rather than ontologically distinct position. Frank Wilderson argues that anti-Blackness structures the world, not just one form of domination among others.

Mbembe rejects this ontological pessimism, arguing it naturalizes what’s historical and forecloses political transformation. For him, Black suffering results from specific historical processes (slavery, colonialism, capitalism) that can be challenged and overcome, not ontological condition.

African Particularity vs. Universal Theory

Some African scholars argue Mbembe’s theoretical abstractions (necropolitics, postcolony) inadequately attend to African contexts’ specificity. His cosmopolitan orientation and dialogue with European theory seem distant from concrete African political struggles.

Others defend his approach: examining African experiences reveals insights applicable globally. Necropolitics developed from studying Africa but illuminates power everywhere. This is decolonial move—African thought generating universal concepts rather than only applying European theories.

Afropolitanism’s Class Politics

Critics charge that Afropolitanism celebrates privileged cosmopolitan elites while ignoring masses experiencing globalization through exploitation, displacement, and violence. Afropolitans’ hybrid identities and global mobilities aren’t available to African workers, peasants, or refugees.

Mbembe acknowledges this tension, noting Afropolitanism names emerging phenomenon, not political program. The question is how cosmopolitan consciousness might inform solidarities rather than reproducing class divisions.

BDS and Israel-Palestine

Mbembe’s comparisons between Israeli occupation and apartheid South Africa, his support for Palestinian rights, and his participation in BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement have made him controversial. Pro-Israel groups accuse him of antisemitism; he’s faced campaign to prevent his speaking and receiving awards.

His defenders argue that criticizing Israeli state policies isn’t antisemitic and that his necropolitics framework illuminates occupation’s violence. Debates continue about how to criticize Zionism without antisemitism, distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Jewish prejudice, and analyze colonialism in Israeli-Palestinian context.

Contemporary Relevance

COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic revealed necropolitical dimensions of contemporary governance: whose deaths matter, which populations are expendable, how states calculate acceptable death rates. Differential mortality rates by race, class, and geography showed how necropower operates—Black, Indigenous, Latinx, poor, and disabled people died disproportionately.

Triage decisions, vaccine distribution, and “reopening” debates all involved necropolitical calculations about whose lives deserve protection vs. whose deaths are acceptable costs.

Police Violence and Abolition

Mbembe’s necropolitics concept proved essential for analyzing police killings of Black people. Police function as necropolitical force—determining who lives, who dies, administering death in streets, jails, and prisons. Black Lives Matter and prison abolition movements use necropolitical frameworks to demand transforming systems organized around death-dealing.

Climate Crisis and Ecological Violence

Climate catastrophe exemplifies necropolitical future-colonization: Global South, Indigenous peoples, poor communities face death-worlds (droughts, floods, heat, displacement) while Global North maintains relative security. Climate policy involves calculating acceptable deaths—which populations can be sacrificed to maintain current systems.

Borders and Migration

Mediterranean deaths, U.S.-Mexico border violence, refugee camps, detention centers—all exemplify contemporary necropolitics. Borders function as death-dealing machines: thousands die crossing, survivors face death-worlds in camps, states perform sovereignty through letting migrants die.